Page 451 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

pie, in conversation analysis. In this latter sense, dis- course analysis is close to what is often called 'text linguistics'; a more pragmatically oriented approach to text production and consumption is often defined as a topic in its own right, called 'text pragmatics.'
A concern for the factors underlying the above- mentioned phenomena of societal underprivilege is often linked to the term 'critical' in the sense defined by the so-called 'Frankfurt School' of sociology (for example, by Jurgen Habermas). This use of the term is closely related to the field of study called 'societal pragmatics' (see Mey 1985 and Sect. 4 below).
The various avenues of pragmatic research and practice that have been indicated above naturally lead to an evaluation and a critical examination of what pragmatics is all about. Reflections of this sort have led to the rise of a subfield called 'metapragmatics,' in which such matters find their natural locus.
3.4.3 Metapragmatics
In accordance with established language use in the sciences, the prefix 'meta-' is used to indicate a shift of 'level': the following discussion is on a different ('meta-') level from its object. Thus, a 'metalanguage' indicates a language that is 'about' (a) language, one level 'up' from that language (also called (an) 'object language'; the terms were originally invented by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski in the 1930s.
A 'metalanguage' is thus a language that comments on, examines, criticizes, etc., what happens on the level of language itself, the 'object language.' In every- day life, metalanguage is used when things are put in (verbal or literal) parentheses or in quotes, for exam- ple, by saying
Thisisstrictlyofftherecord,but...(verbal parenthesis) or
And he goes: 'Don't give me that nonsense'... (direct quote).
Metalanguage is also used to discuss the problems that occur in the daily, object language: thus, every grammatical statement of the form:
The word for 'red' is an adjective in English, but a parti- ciple in Inuit (Eskimo)
is technically a part of the metalanguages of the respective grammars of English and Inuit.
In the same vein, metapragmatics is a (pragmatic) discussion on pragmatics. There are two basic con- siderations that come into play whenever pragmatics is mentioned. One is the fact that pragmatics, by itself, cannot explain or motivate its principles and maxims. The reasons that pragmaticians operate with, for example, a Cooperative Principle (with its attend four Maxims) cannot be found inside pragmatics; neither can such principles be deduced from the observation of pragmatic phenomena.
The other consideration is more complex. It has to do with the fact that the explanatory framework for the observed pragmatic facts cannot by definition be restricted to a single context. The world in which people live is one in which everything hangs together. None of the phenomena of daily or scientific life can be explained in isolation from the rest; neither can use of language. To take but one example: in pragmatics, not only are principles and rules specified, but those rules and principles are also commented on and inter- preted from personal points of view. People make and break the rules—if they want, they can choose not to be polite, for example (this is called 'flouting the principle of politeness' by Grice), if circumstances are such that they think their aims and goals are better realized by not being polite. When someone says, for instance, You did a great job, and I'm not being polite, the latter half of the sentence is a metapragmatic state- ment.
More specifically, and on an even deeper level, meta- pragmatics should worry about the circumstances and conditions that allow people to use their language, or prevent them from using it (or using it adequately, as the case may be). An investigation into these con- ditions is necessary and timely, yet it cannot be dealt with on the level of the observed phenomena alone; which is technically why metapragmatics must be referred to for a discussion of such problems.
Some of the first approaches to metapragmatics were due not to linguists, but to philosophers of lan- guage such as Grice and Searle. They started reflecting on rules for linguistic usage that transcend the mere practical concerns of correctness that are used to characterize language in traditional linguistic think- ing. When Searle, in his ground-breaking work on speech acts, followed Austin in positing certain con- ditions for the felicitous performance of a linguistic act, he was already deep into metapragmatics, even though it was not called that at the time. Similarly, the conditions postulated by Grice on successful com- munication (referred to above by the name of the 'Cooperative Principle') are of a metapragmatic nature, since they deal with the principles that control the pragmatic phenomena. Thus, an important part of metapragmatics deals with the pragmatic rules, principles, and maxims that have been formulated within pragmatics.
The question naturally arises whether those rules and principles are specific for any particular language, or if they can be formulated on a wider scale, so that it might be possible to speak of certain 'universal' principles; as examples, consider the Gricean maxims, or the principle of politeness, as formulated by Geoffrey Leech (1983). It seems unclear in what way such putative 'universals' should be formulated, if indeed they can be found, and how many such uni- versal principles one should allow for. Also, with regard to speech acts, the question has been raised
Pragmatics
429